"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Monday, July 18, 2011

Fake But Accurate? Try: Creepy Even If True.

UPDATE:

Bumped to the top. Apparently the author of the book that contains this highly-revealing scoop about Obama's mother's health insurance is refusing to talk to reporters about it. Byron York of NRO has the story, but Ace at Ace of Spades has the conclusion in a nicely baked, one-sentence souffle of a comment:

They'll decline to market their own books in order to puff up Obama and protect him from all negative coverage.

Who got to her and told her that her next book deal will be a wee-bit bigger if she lays low? Doesn't anyone want to ask the question in the MSM? (Of course not. Silly me.)

*****

Ann Althouse blogs today about a story in the New York Times recounting how a new book has caught President Obama in a lie.... about his own mother's death! Here is the Times:

During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.

But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument....

Althouse says that she doesn't "accept that the President could have an innocently false memory about this story..... Those terrible, heartless corporations have been a theme of the Obama presidency. He has been trying to structure American brains around that idea, so he can win acceptance of policies that most Americans don't want, and that story of his personal agony played an important role in pushing through an immense federal power."

Althouse's point is a good one, that this President has made a habit of pushing anecdotes about his personal life that, in his followers' minds, are "fake but accurate." His mother's inability to get coverage for her medical problems as she died thus, even if fake, is accurate in portraying the evils of the insurance industry, and thus useful to the left as propaganda for a national health system. The ends (nationalized health care) justify the means (lying).

But to me, there's something even worse happening here, something that shows the President not just to be an unscruplous propagandist for the left, but shows him to be.... well, creepy.

First, he's telling a story about his mother's death. His own mother! This ought to be a sacred moment in his life, something that is too private, too personal to be used as a piece of propaganda. It's one thing to dine out on the third-hand suffering of acquaintances... that's gossip, and we've all done that. It's another thing to use what ought to be a son's most profound emotional memory to make a political point. It's ugly. His own mother!

Second, and something that literally cried out for someone to follow up with Obama during the campaign of 2008 and (since that didn't happen) today: even if it were true that his mother couldn't pay her medical bills as she was dying, how exactly is it that she was concerned that it would "bankrupt" her family? In 1995 when she died, Barack Obama was a graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School, a lawyer with the Chicago firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland, a Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, on the board of directors of the Woods Fund, the Joyce Foundation and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He had just published his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Michelle Obama was a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law who was, at the time, the executive director of a major Chicago non-profit. Both had previously worked at a very prominent Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin; both could easily have gone to any major law firm in Chicago and gotten plum (and lucrative) jobs. Meanwhile, the President's mother, Ann Dunham, had only one other child, Maya Soetero, who had already graduated from college (Barnard College at Columbia); Ann Dunham was also divorced; she thus had no dependents. How exactly would her medical bills bankrupt her family? If she ran through her savings and her insurance didn't cover it, she would have been eligible for Medicaid at the very least.

Meanwhile, what kind of creep with a Harvard Law degree and a plum professorship and a book contract lets their mother worry about going bankrupt from medical bills? What kind of creep doesn't step up with an offer to pay? What kind of creep doesn't change jobs, change plans, do anything to make sure that their mother has the best care possible?

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About Me

I am a husband and a father all the time.
During the day, I am an attorney, specializing in large-scale commercial litigation.
In politics, I am a big "R" Republican and a little "d" democrat, meaning I believe in people more than government.
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I was once an English professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, before I grew out of it.
I used to be a Protestant. Then I was a typical over-educated pretentious agnostic. Then I became a semi-Catholic, meaning that my wife is Catholic, my children are Catholic, and I was waiting for lightning to strike. Now I am just a plain old Catholic. Like Chesterton, I wanted to found my own heresy, to be in advance of the age, in advance of the truth. And I found that I was two thousand years behind it.